K.C.Higgins

K.C.Higgins moved to Wisconsin from Pennsylvania when he was nine. At twelve he learned to sail at the Kenosha Sailing Squadron and began a life of loving all things boating. At sixteen he got his first real job, repairing Honda motorcycle transmissions. He was good for the work but the work was not good for him. When he was twenty he got hit by a car on his way to the Dutch Maid for a milkshake and a couple of months later he was in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Unable to stand up to the violence there because of the nearly one thousand stitches still in his nearly severed arm, he began, unconsciously to want to have a voice.Working the keys of the home piano with his damaged hand he slowly learned to play a little and with an ability to write lyrics and sing a bit he landed a spot in a band. The band had a lot of promise and became the house band at Deks Cards Wild Goose in North Chicago but the climate of drug abuse was too much and with the savings from his job at American Motors and a little luck he bought a steel sailboat and headed down the Mississippi River where he got a job at Sintes Boat Yard in New Orleans.It was there that he first began to carve the mahogany and teak scraps that led to his first sculpture; the figurehead on the Angle Runner.His steel sailboat; the Iron-Ox-Hide ended it's life on the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month of 1977 in a summer squall on Lake Pontchartrain that hit sixty eight knots, which is just about seventy seven m.p.h..He went back to Wisconsin and saved up while building an eighteen foot sharpie and went down the River again, this time from Madison on the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi.He traded that boat for a center cockpit gaff ketch that needed a lot of work and ultimately wound up in Sarasota, Fl. where he met the love of his life JoAnn and started restoring antiques. Eventually he had a business carving custom doors but never stopped working on all the other things: writing music, lyrics and short stories, carving wood and stone and drawing the little pictures that would become the illustrations you see here.After trying his hand at working with acrylic and oil he also developed a technique using heat, fire and permanent pen on wood that he uses for his most heartfelt expressions. Look for 'Mixed Media' on his website; www.innov8art.com